It’s a wrap! Observations from this year’s GitHub Universe

2018 marks GitHub’s tenth year of changing the way that we build software, and this year’s GitHub Universe focused on both the corporation’s past and its promising future.

Several members of the MindSource team attended the two-day conference last week at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.

Here are some highlights from the conference:

New features
GitHub announced several product changes and new features including GitHub Actions, Learning Lab, and new security features.

State of the Octoverse

With a community of over 31 million developers, there is no better place to get an understanding of where the software development community is going. In the State of the Octoverse presentation, there were several key takeaways:

Software development is global: 80% of the GitHub users are located outside of the United States.

JavaScript is still king: For the fifth year in a row, JavaScript is the top language, followed by Java, and Python.

The virtual revolution requires C++: C++ jumped up to the 5th most used language. While not stated in the presentation, we think this may have something to do with the emergence of VR/AR technologies.

Some languages are growing in usage: Kotlin, an object-oriented language based on Java, is the fastest growing language in 2018.

Corporations are seeing the value of open source languages and their employees are heavily contributing to their development: In 2018, Microsoft was the top contributor to open source, followed by Google, RedHat, UC Berkeley, and Intel.

The Future of Software is Bright
Throughout GitHub Universe, we engaged in conversations with several students, who were part of the GitHub Education program. Their enthusiasm for open source and software development inspired us.

Kombucha is actually good.
Thank you to the team at Marin Kombucha for providing the Kombucha for our afternoon treat on day 2 of GitHub Universe. It was a big hit and everyone enjoyed the healthy drink!